Absence Quotes - Page 18

• Those who plead their cause in the absence of an opponent can invent to their heart's content, can pontificate without taking into account the opposite point of view and keep the best arguments for themselves, for aggressors are always quick to attack those who have no means of defence.

  Christine de Pizan

  Heart, Mean, Views

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• Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.

  George Saunders

  Erosion, Grace, Intellectual

  George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December”, p.27, A&C Black

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• Though Israel may often be deserving of criticism, what is missing is the comparable criticism of equal or greater violations by other countries and other groups. This constant, often legitimate criticism of Israel for every one of its deviations, when coupled with the absence of legitimate criticism of others, creates the impression currently prevalent on university campuses and in the press that Israel is among the worst human rights violators in the world....it is not true, but if it is repeated often enough, it takes on a reality of its own.

  Alan Dershowitz

  Country, Reality, Rights

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• I wanted to tell the story of these women and the war in the Congo and I couldn't find anything about them in the newspapers or in the library, so I felt I had to get on a plane and go to Africa and find the story myself. I felt there was a complete absence in the media of their narrative. It's very different now, but when I went in 2004 that was definitely the case.

  Lynn Nottage

  War, Media, Library

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• Loneliness Is Not The Absence Of Affection, But The Absence Of Direction.

  Mike Murdock

  Loneliness, Affection

  FaceBook post by Dr. Mike Murdock from Jan 02, 2014

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• I've sworn off agnosticism, which I now call cowardly atheism. I've come to the position that in the complete absence of any supporting data whatsover for the persistence of the individual in some spiritual form, it is necessary to operate under the provisional conclusion that there is no afterlife and then be ready to amend that if I find out otherwise.

  James Cameron

  Spiritual, Persistence, Data

  "The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron". Book by Rebecca Keegan, 2009.

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• Back in pre-Revolutionary America cruel and unusual punishment meant the rack and burning at the stake... in more recent rulings it has been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons.

  Tom Clancy

  Sex, Taken, Mean

  "Executive Orders". Book by Tom Clancy, p. 613, 1996.

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• There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve -- even in pain -- the authentic relationship.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Pain, Firsts, Sound

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• The absence of doubt will turn humans into beasts.

  Ursula Hegi

  Doubt, Beast, Turns

  Ursula Hegi (2012). “Children and Fire: A Novel”, p.249, Simon and Schuster

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• Health is wholeness--wholeness in its most profound sense, with nothing left out and everything in just the right order to manifest the mystery of balance. Far from being simply the absence of disease, health is a dynamic and harmonious equilibrium of all the elements and forces making up and surrounding a human being.

  Andrew Weil

  Order, Profound, Balance

  Andrew Weil (2004). “Health and Healing: The Philosophy of Integrative Medicine”, p.51, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.

  Florence Nightingale

  Nursing, Vanity, Selfishness

  "The Life of Florence Nightingale" by Edward Tyas Cook, (p. 369), 1913.

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• I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

  G. M Gilbert

  Men, Thinking, Evil

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• The concern that some women show at the absence of their husbands, does not arise from their not seeing them and being with them, but from their apprehension that their husbands are enjoying pleasures in which they do not participate, and which, from their being at a distance, they have not the power of interrupting.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Marriage, Husband, Distance

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• Here you are, you're a liberal, probably define peace as the absence of conflict. I define peace as the ability to defend yourself and blow your enemies into smithereens.

  Sean Hannity

  Blow, Enemy, Conflict

  "Hannity" on Fox News, October 13, 2009.

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• Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Children, Missing, Hell

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.244, Macmillan

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• The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. So long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Long, Leader

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• The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.

  Leo Strauss

  Fate, People, Redemption

  Leo Strauss (2012). “Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought”, p.327, SUNY Press

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• What is at stake is how to answer the potential threat Iraq represents with the risk of proliferation of WMD. Baghdad's regime did use such weapons in the past. Today, a number of evidences may lead to think that, over the past four years, in the absence of international inspectors, this country has continued armament programs.

  Jacques Chirac

  Country, Thinking, Past

  "Interview with French President Jacques Chirac". L'Orient-Le Jour Interview, www.globalpolicy.org. October 16, 2002.

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• I have learned that peace is not the absence of trial, trouble, or torment but the presence of calm in the midst of them

  Don Meyer

  Basketball, Nba, Trials

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• Peace is something tangible. It silences the outgoing energy of the mind and feeds the aspiring heart. Peace is not merely the absence of quarreling and fighting. True peace is not affected by the roaring of the world, outer or inner. This sea of peace is at our command if we practise the spiritual life.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Spiritual, Heart, Fighting

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• For the last month I have been a strict vegetarian. The moral effects of this regime are immense, owing to the voluntary subjugation of the flesh and the resulting absence of desires. You will appreciate how full I am of this idea when I tell you that I expect it to work the regeneration of mankind. I advise you to change over to a natural way of life, with proper nourishment (wholemeal bread), and you will soon feel the benefit.

  Gustav Mahler

  Ideas, Appreciate, Desire

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• A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.

  Ayn Rand

  Zero, Suffering, Weakness

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.32, Penguin

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• A performer may be taken in by his own act, convinced at the moment that the impression of reality which he fosters is the one and only reality. In such cases we have a sense in which the performer comes to be his own audience; he comes to be performer and observer of the same show. Presumably he introcepts or incorporates the standards he attempts to maintain in the presence of others so that even in their absence his conscience requires him to act in a socially proper way.

  Erving Goffman

  Taken, Reality, May

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• Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Clear, Prose

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• The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.

  Gregory Maguire

  Evil, Support, World

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